It’s nice for a toy, but difficult to understand when it comes to explaining the true greenness of this invention. A stirling engine-powered toy just hit the market recently, combining a 194-year-old engine concept touted today for its fuel flexibility with solar power-the baby that modern science wants to grow.

I thought Stirling engines can offer great advantages if used in cars, but it never crossed my mind using such an engine in a heating boiler for your household. Evita is the name of the latest boiler made by Remeha, a Dutch company, using a Stirling engine to produce electricity and upload it to the grid.

The next video shows a Stirling engine while working to achieve its best, powered by a 70W light bulb. The poster also shows how he measured various parameters of the engine, like speed, torque, input/output power.

estir Co., an in-company venture of Panasonic led by Teruyuki Akazawa, thought that it would make a good business reusing the otherwise wasted heat from Panasonic’s plants, and reimplemented Stirling engines, seeking to make them more efficient than ever.

Stirling engines are known to mankind for about 200 years but they are not so widely used today, except maybe for the pacemakers and long-distance robotic spacecrafts. This will soon change as 60 stirling engines will be used in Phoenix, Arizona, to harvest solar power which will be converted into electricity.

NASA is said to be the forerunner of the newest invented technologies, even before the military puts an eye on them (or sometimes the second to use them). Still, some NASA officials have decided to use an old technology, such as the Stirling engine, to generate electricity on the future moon bases.

Stirling engines become more and more used and promoted among alternative energy circles. The interesting fact with them is that they can be fueled by any source of heat, and the cleaner the source is, the better the stirling engine does to the environment.